Beggar of Love (3 page)

By the time she was fifteen, everyone but her family called her Jefferson. At Dutchess Academy she was on the volleyball, field hockey, and softball teams. It was an exciting year: Billie Jean King founded the Women’s Tennis Association. She planned to be captain of them all by her junior or senior year. Her parents had been to see the counselors about ten times to try and get her out of sports and onto the junior-miss committee or some other dumb thing, but her coaches couldn’t afford to lose her. A talented athlete, they called her. She knew that already, but she had a secret weapon besides her body: she shone at team playing.

She remembered the exact game that woke her up to team spirit—a field-hockey game against Newby Prep when she was fourteen. It was on the hottest day that fall and she hadn’t been playing well. Besides wilting from the heat, she had the first day of the curse. The darkness that sometimes weighed down on her like a storm cloud she couldn’t get rid of was out in full force that day. She wanted to go back to bed, but her coach knew she could play better so she left Jefferson out on the field for the hour remaining of the game.

What she didn’t know then, what she was seeing now as she watched her teammates, was that when fine athletes are doing poorly, they improve during the course of a game. Despite everything, they somehow come out on top. When the coach left her in the game she was saying, “I believe in you, Jeff.” So she scored twice and they won. She would never mention having the curse, but the other players knew she’d been feeling punk and piled up around her, hugging her and smacking her on the back to give her an extra-special hero’s boost. She felt heroic that day because she’d triumphed over the weather and her body and the tent of darkness—the team had needed her. There were the individual players and there was the coach and there was her, but this whole other being, separate from any of them, called the team, was what got her through a tough day over and over.

Now when they wanted her to run miles on her own and try out for the Olympics, she had no interest. She preferred strategy and bringing a team member from nowhere to score. She could understand wanting to be best in the world at something and maybe she could do it, but it couldn’t beat the rising-sun-daybreak high at the end of a winning game when the team hugged and yelled and sang all the way home on the bus.

It didn’t hurt that Angela Tabor—a townie who attended every game—was one of the women cheering her on.

Jefferson at fifteen, in the year the Twin Towers were born, was sandy-haired and smiled in a crooked way that deepened the dimple to the left of her mouth. She was tall and solid, loose-limbed, and loved to dance. Dumb dances like the Pogo and the Freak were popular, but she could do the Hustle like a pro, as long as she led. Later, she would love disco, that freeform movement that allowed her to toss Angela around like dandelion fluff. She also did the Bump and Grind, which Angela taught her one night when Dutchess Academy had a town-and-gown mixer. By the time the music stopped she knew the way her heart beat at the sight of Angela was something she should only experience for a boy, but it was such a thrill she didn’t care. It was like winning a game, like her team being in sync, like she had found exactly where she belonged and who she was.

After their kiss it would not be the Bear Mountain Spring Beer Fest that Jefferson remembered, it would not be the end of a winter of longing; it would not be the kids tossing balls, the couples holding hands, or the daffodils laughing in the breeze. It would not be her first beer, poured into a huge paper cup by an overworked server in a vest that looked more like a corset with straps and a blouse with big puffy short sleeves. It would be none of those things. It would be the beer-bitter kiss Angela gave her right there on Main Street, in Dutchess, New York, the kiss that, like spring, changed everything.

Lesbian lives may not always be pretty lives, but they abound in pretty moments. To Jefferson that dizzying first kiss felt like the two of them were the center of a whirlpool. Their neighbors, classmates, the shopkeepers they’d known since they were toddlers, their teachers, families were swirling around them, and all of their small Hudson River community was swirling around Flower Park; and all of New York State, the whole Atlantic Seaboard swirled around Dutchess, the whole of the country, all the world swirling in elation around and around the village of Dutchess while Jefferson kissed Angela with the passion of the moment and the passion of a hundred moments when they’d held back.

Her dark days were over. Her wondering, puzzled days of bursting with feelings that had no name and no outlet were history. It was the end of all torment. There could be no more holding back. This was her first woman’s kiss, and her first kiss. The thought of kissing a boy made her burp.

Angela was a different story. Young men seemed to like her angular eyebrows and long, narrow eyes—light toast brown was how Jefferson thought of Angela’s eyes. The boys did not seem to mind that her nose curved like the near beak on her grandmother’s face in an old photograph Angela had shown her, or that her lips looked as if someone had etched them, so precise and deep were their lines. They did not mind the dusky brown hair that should have been black like her mother’s or red like her father’s, and that had natural waves so tight it looked ruffled. Boys had kissed Angela, and Jefferson was to have kissing lessons all spring and summer long from the girl who had practiced on them.

Much later she wondered if her half of the cup of beer had enhanced that magnificent kiss. From that moment she became greedy for both women and whatever liquor a sixteen-year-old girl could easily come by. Had her life since been one long yearning to recreate that moment?

It had been noon. Someone at the pristine white Congregational church set its bells ringing. Then the Episcopalians, never to be outdone, swung theirs in the old stone bell tower while the Catholics played their taped bells across town. The air-raid siren switched on for its weekly test, its mournful wail transformed in Jefferson’s ears to a nasal bellow of glee. The boats on the river bleated and tooted, loosed from their winter moorings this first warm day of the year. The ferry across the Hudson was loudest of all, as if the captain knew there was a first kiss to celebrate. The owners of Mercurys and Buicks, British sports cars and ugly French Citroens beeped greetings at one another and rolled down their windows.

The grown-ups called to one another and lifted toddlers from strollers. Older children, excited by the festival, shrieked and shrilled and squealed with excitement until the old cannon in the little park at the end of Cannon Street boomed once to celebrate the day. The town caretaker had been keeping it ready for their kiss, whispered Angela, even as Jefferson wondered why no one had noticed or objected to two girls kissing.

It could not have been a more momentous kiss. When she opened her eyes she saw bright streamers lifting in the breeze and colorful beer pennants waving, or perhaps that was before she opened her eyes. For sure, when she opened her eyes, there was Angela, holding both of her hands, her best friend since Angela had moved to town six months earlier. Angela’s parents had taken over Hiram’s Soda Fountain in Dutchess.

Poor Angela had obviously been bored after living in the city where adventure awaited her on every corner, jingling the change in its pockets. Angela was a lush girl at fifteen, five months younger than Jefferson, a gorgeous eligible girl whose family was making sure their daughter would have every frill imaginable at a glorious wedding.

Angela Tabor didn’t seem interested in her eligibility. She told Jefferson that boys were boring pigs. Jefferson had seen her slap one who’d grabbed for her at school. Perhaps for the daughter of immigrants in a town that seemed well content to be separated from the melting pot of New York City by a forty-five-minute northbound train ride, it was her sense of herself as a stranger that inclined her to Jefferson, who also felt she fit nowhere. Pledging allegiance to the American flag, she’d confided to Jefferson, turned her insides to grateful, inspired mush, and she said she had learned, on assembly days, to brazenly bear her teachers’ sympathetic looks when they noticed her stealthily wipe tears from her eyes after singing “America, the Beautiful.” Jefferson found her slight accent electrifying.

Was this why Angela first spoke to Jefferson—could she tell that Jefferson was different too? Had Angela noticed that Jefferson never giggled about boys, never thrust out a newly swelled chest to provoke them? Jefferson herself slouched, as if to emphasize that whatever treasures lay beneath her blouse were not being cultivated for male adolescent riffraff. Then again, it may have been Jefferson’s name itself, so very American.

Angela had already erased most traces of her first languages, Greek and a smattering of her father’s native Czech. She wanted to be really American, so no one could tell she’d been conceived in no country but on a freighter—conceived by a father fed up with a homeland that didn’t like Jews and a mother whose family had always survived by smuggling off the coast of Greece. Why not smuggle people? The family had never before lost a daughter to one of their refugees.

Maybe a Jefferson, her eyes seemed to plead, maybe a Jefferson from the big house that looked down on the river, whose aunt owned that classic beauty right in town, set back from Main Street, with an iron gate out front and a sign that said it was built in 1889, maybe a Jefferson could give her what she had not inherited in her blood: the American arrogance and matter-of-factness about having—having freedom, having possessions, having education.

After the kiss, Jefferson withdrew her hands from Angela’s, but continued to hold her. She wanted Angela, half a foot shorter than her, to feel cherished. With the festival at high pitch around them and her heart pressed to Angela, she believed with her whole pleased and uproariously beating heart that the world—her team—was celebrating the first spring of forever with her Angela.

Once, when Jefferson’s father was shaving in his bathroom, he let her stand on the toilet seat next to the sink and lather shaving cream on her little-girl cheeks. He kept the razor to himself so she lost interest and watched him until he used a washcloth to clean the foamy stuff off her face. He used his index finger inside the washcloth lightly, as if it was his shaver slicing through the cream. It tickled. She laughed so much he couldn’t finish and gave her the cloth to get the last bits. It was fun, but after that he always kept the bathroom door shut when he shaved, and she couldn’t reach his shaving cream up in the medicine cabinet. Now and then, though, for the rest of her life, she would rub her jaw as if feeling for whiskers, like her father did.

Sometimes, both in Dutchess and in the city, she sat on the floor next to Emmy’s vanity while Emmy, on an upholstered stool, put on makeup. There was a small rug in the Dutchess house, with a raised flower pattern, green on green, with little yellow and light blue specks. She would settle on it and sometimes trace the outlines of the flowers, sometimes run her hand up and down the smooth round pieces of the vanity’s legs while she watched her mother.

The best part was the little things Emmy used. The eyebrow pencil was red and had a sharpener, and Emmy left red and tan peels on the low-down part where everything was laid out. The vanity had little wooden beads along the front and four deep drawers Jefferson wasn’t allowed to open. Emmy used a shiny thing to curl her eyelashes up and then a tiny brush that made them dark. She scraped the brush on a pad in a red holder as little as a matchbook. There was powder too, in a round marshmallow-colored box. The pink powder puff sent up smoke signals as Emmy patted it into the white stuff.

When Emmy was finished, Amelia collected the pencil shavings and sniffed them. They smelled better than the powder and perfume. The perfume was named Prince Matchabelly, Emmy said. Emmy got up and stood in her black silky slip. She was very pretty. Her cheeks were all pink then and her eyes were dark. She smiled at Jefferson like a mother in a Golden Book. Her hair was up in the back. She looked like a movie star. Amelia felt heat fill the bedroom. They were going to a party at her father’s work. “I hope there’s dancing,” said Emmy, stepping into high heels, her hand, with red fingernails, on Amelia’s father’s shoulder to keep from falling over.

The wood shavings curled around Amelia’s fingers and fell to the floor. She bent over and picked them up again. Emmy turned her back to Amelia’s father and he zipped up her slinky dress. Amelia went back to the vanity and climbed on Emmy’s vanity stool. She picked up the eyebrow pencil and drew a mustache over her lips. Her father’s mustache was neater. Emmy slipped the pencil from between her small fingers and placed it in a drawer, then put away the Maybelline and moved the powder and perfume out of reach. Jarvy picked up the lipstick and dabbed a little on Amelia’s lips, then, with great care, applied it to Emmy’s lips.

Amelia looked in the mirror. She had a mustache and lipstick! She laughed and showed her face to Emmy, who didn’t look, then to her father, who was putting on his black shiny shoes. She ran her tongue along her lower lip. The lipstick tasted like a candle. Emmy folded a tissue and popped her lips up and down on it—Amelia could hear the little popping sound like Emmy was kissing the tissue—until there was a red mark on the tissue.

She used the side of her hand to wipe the slimy stuff off herself. When she looked up, her father was in his good blue suit. She liked his black-and-red striped tie. She liked all his ties. It was magic, the way it was a long flat thing and then he put it around his neck and it made him handsome. Her hand was red from the lipstick. She hid it in her bathrobe pocket so Emmy wouldn’t notice.